Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in the new Republic of Pakistan and Sasha, son of an East German Lutheran pastor, first meet as students in West Berlin in the late 60s, then again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in the modern world of terror.
"I am a camera with its shutter open." There is something unmistakably 20th Century about this, the opening line to Goodbye to Berlin. In their coolness and clarity and melancholy detachment these words express more about a moment in time than most entire novels do. Berlin Stories is not quite a novel; it's actually two short ones stuck together, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. But they form one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930's, where jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if that would save them from the creeping rise of Nazism.
Going After Cacciato is a war novel written by author Tim O'Brien and winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 1979. This complex novel is set during the Vietnam War and is told from the point of view of the protagonist, Paul Berlin. The story traces the events that ensue after Cacciato, a member of Berlin's squad, decides to go AWOL by walking from Vietnam to France, through Asia. Cacciato is an Italian word, pronounced "catch-ee-otto," which means "hunted"/"caught" in Italian.
Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.24 | Fiction literature | 8 April 2011
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The Bullet Trick - Louise Welsh
When down-at-heel Glasgow conjurer, William Wilson gets booked for a string of cabaret gigs in Berlin, he's hoping his luck's on the turn. There were certain spectators from his last show who he'd rather forget. Like the one who's now a corpse. Amongst the showgirls and tricksters of Berlin's scandalous underground Wilson can abandon his heart, his head and, more importantly, his past. But secrets have a habit of catching up with him and, as he gets sucked into certain lucrative after-hours work, the line between what's an act and what's real starts to blur.
'Fascinating, extraordinary, gripping' - Jeremy Paxman. The Storming of Berlin had been the Red Army's dream of vengeance ever since the German's invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. Antony Beevor has reconstituted the experience of those millions caught up in the nightmare crescendo of the Third Reich's final defeat.
